I got a lot done yesterday--finished editing a chapter, grocery-shopped, mowed and trimmed, and foisted the vacuuming onto Paul. Today I've got my exercise class to sweat through and a small amount of editing to do, and then I'll turn my thoughts to Frost Place prep and weeding the strawberry bed.

It will be another mid-70s day, and the summer garden is taking hold . . . tomato plants noticeably taller every day, pea pods setting on the vines, roses budding, and the first lilies beginning to open.

Maybe this afternoon I'll find time to sit in the shade and work on my laundry poem. The street construction is a drag, but at least the back garden is somewhat protected from the dust and the uproar. I am cheerful and full of energy but also feeling weighed down by obligation. How to be solitary; how to let time slide: those are not the stories of my life at the moment. So I read and write in noise and distraction, in compressed half-hours, and I get the work done anyway, albeit much more slowly, and I surprise myself, which is the point, isn't it? Or maybe the point is: I don't know how not to read and write.